Our age has built itself vast reservoirs of power / formless as the straining energy that it wrests from the earth.

It is necessary – and toward this point our development will move, little by little – that nothing alien happen to us, but only what has long been our own.

Love consists of this: two solitudes that meet, protect and greet each other.

Beauty is only the start of bearable terror.

Seele im RaumHier bin ich, hier bin ich, Entrungene,taumelnd.Wag ichs denn? Werf ich mich?Fähige waren schon vieldort, wo ich drängte. Nun woauch noch die Mindesten restlos Macht vollziehn,schweigend vor Meisterschaft —:Wag ichs denn ? Werf...

So it’s back once more, back up the slope.Why do they always ruin my ropewith their cuts?I felt so ready the other day,Had a real foretaste of eternityIn my guts.Spoonfeeding me yet another sipfrom life’s...

there is only one solitude, and it is vast, heavy, difficult to bear, and almost everyone has hours when he would gladly exchange it for any kind of sociability, however trivial or cheap, for the...

You are looking outside, and that is what you should most avoid right now. No one can advise or help you – no one. There is only one thing you should do. Go into yourself....

She who reconciles the ill-matched threadsOf her life, and weaves them gratefullyInto a single cloth – It’s she who drives the loudmouths from the hallAnd clears it for a different celebration.

A billion stars go spinning through the night, / glittering above your head, / But in you is the presence that will be / when all the stars are dead.

Oh hours of childhood,when behind each shape more than the past appearedand what streamed out before us was not the future.We felt our bodies growing and were at times impatient to be grown up, half...

I have often wondered whether especially those days when we are forced to remain idle are not precisely the days spend in the most profound activity. Whether our actions themselves, even if they do not...

Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own...

The free animalhas its dying always behind itand God in front of it, and its wayis the eternal way, as the spring flowing.Never, not for a moment, do we havepure space before us, where the...

This advance (at first very much against the will of the outdistanced men) will transform the love experience, which is now filled with error, will change it from the ground up, and reshape it into...

And when suddenlythe god stopped her and, with anguish in his cry,uttered the words: ‘He has turned round’ –she comprehended nothing and said softly: ‘Who?

we want it visibleto showwhen even the most visible joywill reveal itselfonly when we havetransformed it within.there’s nowhere, my love, the world can existexpect within.

And that is why it is so important to be solitary and attentive when one is sad: because the seemingly uneventful and motionless moment when our future steps into us is so much closer to...

I believe that almost all our sadnesses are moments of tension that we find paralyzing because we no longer hear our surprised feelings living. Because we are alone with the alien thing that has entered...

No, my life is not this precipitous hourthrough which you see me passing at a run.

Ist dir Trinken bitter, werde Wein.

Extinguish my eyes, I’ll go on seeing you.Seal my ears, I’ll go on hearing you.And without feet I can make my way to you,without a mouth I can swear your name.Break off my arms, I’ll...

I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other.

That is fundamentally the only courage which is demanded of us: to be brave in the face of the strangest, most singular and most inexplicable things that can befall us

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all. Once for each thing. Just...

And you should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is something in you that wants to move out of it.

Girls, there are poets who learn from youto say, what you, in your aloneness, are;and they learn through you to live distantness,as the evenings through the great starsbecome accustomed to eternity.

I must,” then build your life in accordance with this necessity; your whole life, even into its humblest and most indifferent hour, must become a sign and witness to this impulse. Then come close to...

Isn’t it time that these most ancient sorrows of ours grew fruitful? Time that we tenderly loosed ourselves from the loved one, and, unsteadily, survived: the way the arrow, suddenly all vector, survives the string...

Sonnets To Orpheus, Part Two, XIIWant the change. Be inspired by the flamewhere everything shines as it disappears.The artist, when sketching, loves nothing so muchas the curve of the body as it turns away.What locks...

The deepest experience of the creator is feminine, for it is experience of receiving and bearing.

We, hurt by ourselves, keento be hurters and keento be hurt back deep inside.We, like weapons laidbeside anger asleep.

Make your ego porous. Will is of little importance, complaining is nothing, fame is nothing. Openness, patience, receptivity, solitude is everything.

Why don’t you think of [God] as the one who is coming, who has been approaching from all eternity… the ultimate fruit of a tree whose leaves we are.

Be ahead of all parting, as though it already were behind you, like the winter that has just gone by. For among these winters there is one so endlessly winterthat only by wintering through it...

Our heart always transcends us.

so much is happening now; you must be patient like someone who is sick, and confident like someone who is recovering; for perhaps you are both. And more: you are also the doctor, who has...

They all have tired mouthsand bright seamless souls.And a longing (as for sin)sometimes haunts their dreams.They are almost all alike; in God’s gardens they keep still,like many, many intervalsin his might and melody.Only when they...

Things are not all so comprehensible and utterable as people would mostly have us believe; most events are unutterable, consummating themselves in a sphere where word has never trod, and more unutterable than them all...

Perhaps all the dragons in our lives are princesses who are only waiting to see us act, just once, with beauty and courage. Perhaps everything that frightens us is, in its deepest essence, something helpless...

The purpose of life is to be defeated by greater and greater things.

for sometime now I have believed that it is our own force, all our own force that is still too great for us. It is true that we do not know it; but is it...

Think… of the world which you carry within yourself… and set it above everything that you notice about you. Your inmost happening is worth your whole love, that is what you must somehow work at,...

You, yesterday’s boy,to whom confusion came:Listen, lest you forget who you are.It was not pleasure you fell into. It was joy.You were called to be bridegroom,though the bride coming toward you is your shame.What chose...

Never forget that solitude is my lot … I implore those who love me to love my solitude.”(Letter to Mimi Romanelli, May 11, 1910)

Turn your attentions to it. Try to raise up the sunken feelings of this enormous past; your personality will grow stronger, your solitude will expand and become a place where you can live in the...

For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terrorwhich we are barely able to endure, and it amazes us so,because it serenely disdains to destroy us.Every angel is terrible.

If we surrenderedto earth’s intelligencewe could rise up rooted, like trees.Instead we entangle ourselvesin knots of our own makingand struggle, lonely and confused.So like children, we begin again…to fall,patiently to trust our heaviness.Even a bird...

Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions...

Ideally a painter (and, generally, an artist) should not become conscious of his insights: without taking the detour through his conscious reflection, his progressive steps, mysterious even to himself, should enter so swiftly into the...